This is How Much Happier Therapy Makes You Than More Money

You need enough to live, but loads of it doesn’t make you that much happier.

It’s something we’ve all heard — whether it’s from psych studies or rich people — but do we behave as though it’s true?

I sometimes wonder.

To help convince our inner Mr Burns, here’s a nice statistic from a study done by researchers at the Universities of Manchester and Warwick, who compared the happiness gains from money to that from psychological therapy (Boyce & Wood, 2009).

They found that therapy was 32 times as cost effective as money in making you happier.

They reached this figure by looking at thousands of people who’d started therapy and compared them with others who’d had large increases in their income.

It turned out that to get the same increase in happiness from $1,300 spent on therapy, a person would have to get a mammoth pay rise of $42,000.

Hardly likely, right?

The study’s lead author, Chris Boyce, said:

“Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies.

The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realise the powerful effect that psychological therapy, such as non-directive counselling, can have on improving our well-being.”

If this is true, why are many governments so obsessed with economic growth and apparently so little concerned with mental health?